http://www.slate.com/id/2245188

It was Christmas Eve 1926, the streets aglitter with snow and lights, when the man afraid of Santa Claus stumbled into the emergency room at New York City’s Bellevue Hospital. He was flushed, gasping with fear: Santa Claus, he kept telling the nurses, was just behind him, wielding a baseball bat.

Before hospital staff realized how sick he was—the alcohol-induced hallucination was just a symptom—the man died. So did another holiday partygoer. And another. As dusk fell on Christmas, the hospital staff tallied up more than 60 people made desperately ill by alcohol and eight dead from it. Within the next two days, yet another 23 people died in the city from celebrating the season.

Doctors were accustomed to alcohol poisoning by then, the routine of life in the Prohibition era. The bootlegged whiskies and so-called gins often made people sick. The liquor produced in hidden stills frequently came tainted with metals and other impurities. But this outbreak was bizarrely different. The deaths, as investigators would shortly realize, came courtesy of the U.S. government.

Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people.

Today the US government continues to kill tens of thousands less directly through the so called war on drugs. From raids to bad black market heroin those in power systematically place those people in danger who they swore an oath to protect.

http://nypost-se.com

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 21, 2009

“WE’RE SCREWED”: MEDIA HEIST BLANKETS CITY WITH “SPECIAL EDITION” NEW YORK POST
Tabloid Tells Truth About Climate Change and How It Will Affect City, World

Contact: The Yes Men <mailto:tabloid@theyesmen.org>, 347-254-7054, 646-220-4137
Fake New York Post: http://www.nypost-se.com/
Video News Release: http://www.nypost-se.com/video
City report on climate change: http://www.nyc.gov/html/om/pdf/2009/NPCC_CRI.pdf
Wake-up call: http://www.tcktcktck.org/wakeup

Early this morning, nearly a million New Yorkers were stunned by the appearance of a “special edition” New York Post blaring headlines that their city could face deadly heat waves, extreme flooding, and other lethal effects of global warming within the next few decades. The most alarming thing about it: the news came from an official City report.

Distributed by over 2000 volunteers throughout New York City, the paper has been created by The Yes Men and a coalition of activists as a wake-up call to action on climate change. It appears one day before a UN summit where Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon will push 100 world leaders to make serious commitments to reduce carbon emissions in the lead-up to the Copenhagen climate conference in December. Ban has said that the world has “less than 10 years to halt (the) global rise in greenhouse gas emissions if we are to avoid catastrophic consequences for people and the planet,” adding that Copenhagen is a “once-in-a-generation opportunity.”

Although the 32-page New York Post is a fake, everything in it is 100% true, with all facts carefully checked by a team of editors and climate change experts.

“This could be, and should be, a real New York Post,” said Andy Bichlbaum of the Yes Men. “Climate change is the biggest threat civilization has ever faced, and it should be in the headlines of every paper, every day until we solve the problem.”

The fake Post’s cover story (“We’re Screwed”) reports the frightening conclusions of a blue-ribbon panel of scientists commissioned by the mayor’s office to determine the potential effects of climate change on the City. That report was released in February of this year, but received very little press at the time.

Other lead articles describe the Pentagon’s alarmed response to global warming (“Clear & Present Disaster”), the U.S. government’s sadly minuscule response to the crisis (“Congress Cops Out on Climate”), China’s alternative energy program (“China’s Green Leap Forward Overtakes U.S.”), and how if the US doesn’t quickly pass a strong climate bill, the crucial Copenhagen climate talks this December could be a “Flopenhagen.”

The paper includes original investigative reporting as well. One article (“Carbon counter counts New Yorkers as fools”) reveals that Deutsche Bank – which erected a seven-story “carbon counter” in central Manhattan – not only invests heavily in coal-mining companies worldwide, but has recently entered the business of coal trading itself.

The paper has the world’s gloomiest weather page, covering the next 70 years rather than just 7 days. The “Around the World” section describes the disproportionate effects of climate change on poorer parts of the world, including extreme droughts, floods, famines, water shortages, mass migrations and conflicts. Developing countries will bear the brunt of climate change effects even though they have done very little to cause the problem.

But the paper isn’t all doom and gloom. An article called “New York Fights Back” notes that the carbon emissions of Big Apple residents are only one third the national average, and that the city is building 1800 miles of bike paths, planting one million trees, and replacing its fleet of police cars with hybrids. There’s also a page of black-humor cartoons (in one, Charlie Brown finds Snoopy drowned), a gossip section that takes no prisoners, and a number of truly cheerful ads – for sex (“Awesome. No carbon emissions.”), tote bags, bicycles, and tap water (“Literally comes right out of your faucet!”).

Another ad promotes civil disobedience, encouraging readers to visit http://BeyondTalk.net and pledge to risk arrest in a planned global action November 30, just before the conference in Copenhagen.

“We need strong action on climate change,” said David Solnit of Mobilization for Climate Justice West, one of the partners in BeyondTalk.net. “But history shows that leaders act only when people take to the streets to demand it. That’s what needs to happen now.”

This paper is one of 2500 initiatives taking place in more than 130 countries as a response to the “Global Wake-up Call” on climate change.  For more information, visit www.tcktcktck.org/wakeup

Even if their concern is warranted, which I seriously question, the means they advocate will not make things better but surely make them worse for us all. Remove government regulations restricting the market from developing cleaner solutions, remove government subsidies and most importantly… start enforcing property rights.

Repudiate the debt

I think I’d be perfectly happy with such an action. Perhaps this can be a new Downsize DC Campaign?

• (08/03/2009 04:02:31 PM) JDTalley: We’re in the no man’s land between Detroit and Windsor, Canada… on accident. Wrong turns suck.
• (08/03/2009 04:03:36 PM) JDTalley: Canadian border guards are tossing our motorhome again. I just cleaned it.
• (08/03/2009 05:49:25 PM) JDTalley: Now we are getting hassled by U.S. Border Guards in Detroit. #MHD
• (08/03/2009 05:50:45 PM) JDTalley: U.S. Border Guard told @peteeyre to stop recording or his camera would be confiscated.
• (08/03/2009 05:52:45 PM) JDTalley: Reinforcements have been called. Homeland Security vehicle is now blocking MARV.
• (08/03/2009 05:55:46 PM) JDTalley: We will now be escorted into a new holding area. This time it’s the U.S. government.
• (08/03/2009 06:18:50 PM) JDTalley: #MHD 3 released from the custody of U.S. & Canadian crossing guards. @ryanmaddox89 is my hero.

Follow them at @JDTalley and @peteeyre and @MHDiaries

http://thedartmouth.com/…

David Boaz, a libertarian author and television commentator, discussed the need to prevent the U.S. government from encroaching on freedoms in a lecture held in Kemeny Hall on Thursday. The event, “Freedom in Crisis,” was sponsored by the Dartmouth College Libertarians.

“My own attitude towards the Free State Project is that the federal government should move to New Hampshire and leave the rest of us free,” Boaz joked.

“Freedom is under assault again,” he said. “It is easy to let the immensity stop us. But it didn”t stop Thomas Paine, it didn’t stop Frederick Douglass and it didn’t stop us.”

Another student asked Boaz about the Free State Project, a group that aims to recruit 20,000 “liberty loving people” to move to New Hampshire and direct the New Hampshire government in a libertarian direction.

While I agree moving the federal government to NH rather than activists would be a better solution… however that’s not possible and that wasn’t the question. By giving the answer he did it seems to me that he thinks very little of the FSP and it’s goal.

If the goal is freedom… how much of it has Cato brought about? Seems to me their goal is to ride the Washington DC statists coat tails and preach half baked liberty oriented ideas to the most statist of them all… DC bureacrats.

Not to say that the FSP had brought about much change yet. Then again they haven’t been around for 32 years.

http://www.eff.org/…

Friday evening, in a motion to dismiss Jewel v. NSA, EFF’s litigation against the National Security Agency for the warrantless wiretapping of countless Americans, the Obama Administration’s made two deeply troubling arguments.

First, they argued, exactly as the Bush Administration did on countless occasions, that the state secrets privilege requires the court to dismiss the issue out of hand. They argue that simply allowing the case to continue “would cause exceptionally grave harm to national security.” As in the past, this is a blatant ploy to dismiss the litigation without allowing the courts to consider the evidence.

It’s an especially disappointing argument to hear from the Obama Administration. As a candidate, Senator Obama lamented that the Bush Administration “invoked a legal tool known as the ’state secrets’ privilege more than any other previous administration to get cases thrown out of civil court.” He was right then, and we’re dismayed that he and his team seem to have forgotten.

Sad as that is, it’s the Department Of Justice’s second argument that is the most pernicious. The DOJ claims that the U.S. Government is completely immune from litigation for illegal spying — that the Government can never be sued for surveillance that violates federal privacy statutes.

This is a radical assertion that is utterly unprecedented. No one — not the White House, not the Justice Department, not any member of Congress, and not the Bush Administration — has ever interpreted the law this way.

Previously, the Bush Administration has argued that the U.S. possesses “sovereign immunity” from suit for conducting electronic surveillance that violates the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). However, FISA is only one of several laws that restrict the government’s ability to wiretap. The Obama Administration goes two steps further than Bush did, and claims that the US PATRIOT Act also renders the U.S. immune from suit under the two remaining key federal surveillance laws: the Wiretap Act and the Stored Communications Act. Essentially, the Obama Adminstration has claimed that the government cannot be held accountable for illegal surveillance under any federal statutes.

Again, the gulf between Candidate Obama and President Obama is striking. As a candidate, Obama ran promising a new era of government transparency and accountability, an end to the Bush DOJ’s radical theories of executive power, and reform of the PATRIOT Act. But, this week, Obama’s own Department Of Justice has argued that, under the PATRIOT Act, the government shall be entirely unaccountable for surveilling Americans in violation of its own laws.

This isn’t change we can believe in. This is change for the worse.

Do I need to repeat myself about how I don’t think this is the change people were expecting?

I caught this comment on Slashdot about this story that I really liked.

It is my position that Bush was a horrible president because he weakened our constitution, was an ugly warmonger, and spent money like it was water.

It is my position that Obama is about the same with the only difference being who gets some of the wastefully spent money.

Both “sides” treat the populace like we’re their own public goatse waiting patiently to get stretched just a bit wider by some Republican prick or a Democratic cock.

If only that could be the image people imagined when someone said “Republican” or “Democrat.” Third parties would have no problem getting into office. Perhaps that could be the attack plan for 2012. Splice in a single frame of goatse.cx once in a while during R and D presidential debate feeds.